Is Khomeini the leader for Iran?
Roger Cooper
Despite the weeks of suspense leading up to it, the Shah's departure from Iran seems to have done little to solve Iran's worsening chaos. The Shah's ghost lingers on, embodied in Dr Bakhtiar's government and the regency council he left behind, and in the officer corps whose loyalty to their commander-in-chief is still largely intact.
So nothing much has changed. Like his royal master before him, Dr Bakhtiar dithers, in an attempt to buy time and find compromise formulas that he should by now realise will never work. The army, getting daily more restless in their ambivalent role, alternate between fraternisation and bloody rampages, as they have since they were first called in last summer. Like the Shah, Dr Bakhtiar sees the whole conflict as a personal clash between himself and the Ayatollah Khomeini and puts his personal honour above the nation's interests.
Meanwhile the West continues to tot up the losses it has suffered from the Iranian crisis in strategic and economic terms. As the main beneficiaries, together with the Iranian elite, of the Pahlavi boom-years, there is considerable and understandable consternation, but much of this is unwarranted. Geo-politically, Iran is no nearer falling into Communist orbit than it was a year ago, when the nation's pent-up bitterness could just as easily have rallied behind a Marxist-led military coup as it has behind the almost embarrassingly antiCommunist Ayatollah Khomeini.
Likewise, the number of Western firms that have burnt their fingers in Iran is surprisingly small. Iranian insistence on equity control has long meant that actual investment from outside has been minimal. The Shah's ill-conceived wider industrial ownership and anti-profiteering schemes, coupled with a frighteningly complex business climate and a recession that began long before the political troubles, made many foreign firms realise that Iran was not the Eldorado they expected in the midSeventies. Much of the smart money, Iranian as well as foreign, had therefore already left the country by the time the crisis began to hit the headlines. The economic loss to the West is chiefly in profits that might never have materialised, and adverse effects on its balance of payments and employment figures if the Iranian market cannot be speedily replaced.
Looking ahead, there are valuable strategic lessons for the West — or rather the United States — to learn from the debacle, such as the need for realistic intelligence assessments and the dangers of propping up despotic regimes, although it comes as a shock that these lessons were not learned in south-east Asia. If President Carter calls for a review of all such special relationships, and of the Nixon Doctrine that often amounts to playing regional favourites, so much the better. And once a political solution can be found in Iran there should be new opportunities for Western firms to rebuild the economy, hopefully on sounder foundations than in the past.
The chances of finding that solution, however, are not at present favourable. The stalemate in the country continues, with the well-meaning but discredited Bakhtiar government still refusing to hand over power to what the masses — in their wisdom, or lack of it — so clearly want: this means that the ghastly toll of human life will continue to mount. Countless 'scenarios' are still being analysed both abroad and in Iran itself. But the plain fact is that the majority of Iranians, or certainly the majority prepared to do something about it (which is what matters ultimately in both totalitarian and democratic sscieties), want the Ayatollah and his still nebulous Islamic republic. They do not want Dr Bakhtiar's promises of free elections or constitutional revision — and they are prepared to die for their refusal to accept them.
It is still extremely difficult for outsiders to understand the message preached by the aged theologian from his unlikely pulpit in the commuter belt of Paris, or to take him seriously as a political leader. His appearance counts against him in the West. Instead of the smartly-dressed Shah, well-versed in such concepts as fast-breeder reactors and. secondary oil recovery, our television screens now show a stern patriarchal figure with bushy eyebrows matching his black turban and aba and offsetting a grizzled grey beard. The Shah's fluent English and French, shared by Dr Bakhtiar, contrast with the Ayatollah's second language, Arabic; and the Ayatollah's political and economic pronouncements, brief though they are, betray a lack of knowledge of modern developments.
Yet this does not mean that Khomeini is 'out of touch' with Iran, as is often stated. For it is precisely because the vast majority of Iranians themselves have no real understanding of the implications essential to the Western way of life, which the Shah chose for them and which they at first so eagerly embraced, that Khomeini is closer to the man in the Iranian street (or field) than their King of Kings was. He has understood, even before most of them did themselves, that Iranians do not Want to be third-rate, or even second-rate, Westerners. Instead, he is offering them the chance to resume their true cultural and national identity which, throughout the half-century of Pahlavi rule, has time and again clashed with the rapid and alien modernisation imposed by the Shah and his father. The Ayatollah also happens to fill the leadership vacuum created by the Shah's inaction over the past year.
But on the details of his programme he is far from specific. In a recent interview he sidestepped my questions on the proposed republic with phrases like 'It will be based on Islam and the Koran' and 'It will be republican in form and Islamic in content.' As do the other religious leaders I have spoken to in Iran, he promises to respect the rights of the religious minorities, but they are understandably worried that their position will be less comfortable in a strict Islamic environment than it was in largely secular Pahlavi Iran.
On economic matters he speaks less convincingly. Interest, whether paid or earned, is as prohibited as wine or pork to a devout Muslim, and the Ayatollah stands firm on this. Yet how can a modern economy, which Iran's now largely is, operate without a system of incentives and penalties to lender and borrower alike, particularly in times of massive inflation? It may be that, as in Saudi Arabia, interest will be cosmetically renamed commission, but critics of the Ayatollah can justifiably question his ability to run Iran's affairs on the evidence of such pronouncements — however religiously sound they may be.
Equally important is the question of how far Iranians will wish to travel along this road towards orthodox Shi'ism and for how long. Gibbon stated that the wines of Shiraz had always triumphed over the laws of Mohammad and so they may again, for there is almost certain to be a reaction to strict application of Islamic law long before the stage of hand-cutting for theft and beheading for adultery is reached.
The Ayatollah warns that there may be a plot afoot to thwart his seemingly inexorable rise to power, and the dangers of an army coup, the last of the last ditches, are certainly real. The word danger is used advisedly here, because the army has already failed dismally in all its attempts at government; and a coup would only lead to civil or guerrilla war, general strikes, complete economic paralysis and a prolonged misery and divisiveness that could set the nation back decades. Against this chilling prospect that of an Iranian Islamic republic, cranky and inefficient though it might well seem to outsiders, but itself capable of change and development, must surely be more alluring to all but the most stubborn defenders of an ancien regime. For we must now reflect with KhayyamFitzgerald: How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp Abode his destined Hour, and went his ways and start thinking seriously about the succession.
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